Three Architectures, Three Times and Three Places in the Ruins of the Parthenon

Inhabiting ruins is closely connected to discovering a memory. Memory is that room where, sometimes, our gaze lingers, looking for a time and a place of our own. Inhabiting is, then, moving to a place whose memory we aim to turn into our homeland.

We propose three moves – three gazes – that sought that homeland in the same place: the ruins of the Parthenon. First, the move of a London engraver who captured the opulent fête that a minister of the Greek army offered to the French and English troops in those ruins in 1854. The Parthenon, in a renewed life, becomes the open window to a homeland of men whose time is as fleeting as the time of a dinner. Second, 50 years later, we discover the stop of two travelers – a painter and his father – in Athens. Their gaze on those same ruins turns the architecture into a clearing that binds heaven and earth together, in a time frozen by the hasty flight of those gods defeated by destiny. Finally, we explore the visit of an American architect 100 years after that London engraver who aimed to show us that same stone structure as a place halfway between old gods and new men, in a time that both decide to share again.

The visit to these three gazes that inhabited the Parthenon will show that the memory inhabiting the ruins keeps, in its different lives, our renewed fates.